Anthropological Vision in Interwar Art and its Publications: An Ethnographic Turn

Abstract

During the interwar period, a new appreciation of what were then called “primitive” arts took hold, stimulated by the spread of anthro-pological studies. Artistic publications were opened to scientists and to treatments of those productions from a purely ethnographic point of view, oblivious to aesthetic evaluations. This occurred with partic-ular intensity in the French milieu. Concentrating on French publica-tions, this paper deals mainly with scientific collaborations in modern art magazines, and how these approaches and the new anthropolog-ical contextualizations permeated art criticism and the artistic work itself, to the extent that a kind of “ethnographic turn” can be iden-tified. Focused on period documents, in many cases rarely noticed, the article aims to provide a significant and conceptually complete account—attentive to different artistic sensibilities—of the way this turn manifested itself throughout the period dealt with.